How utterly surprising that Van Jackson couches his attack on the ‘Left’ and its seeming lack of a Foreign Policy, via the route of an active, not just defense of Neo-Liberalism, but celebration of this failed and failing politic/economic/ethical ideology! Wendy Brown in her ‘Undoing the Demos’ is just one of the polemics against this failed ‘Free Market Revolution’ and its trio of false prophets Hayek,Mises and Friedman

In three turgid paragraphs, that could have been better spent, with the usual Party Line of ‘The Post-War Liberal Order’ which in the double-speak of the Foreign Policy technocrat is equal to American Hegemony. Yet he quite cunningly uses speculation and wan questioning as his rhetorical strategy.The Wisdom of the Market is antithetical to an actual Left rather than a Right Wing Social Democrat posing as a Leftist. Is the ‘Left’ in America defined by the inept Neo-Liberal Barack Obama?

Here is Mr. Jackson’s brief biography supplied by The Wilson Center:

Bio

Dr. Van Jackson is an American political scientist, strategist, and media commentator specializing in Asian security and defense affairs. He is a senior lecturer in international relations at Victoria University of Wellington, as well as the Defence & Strategy Fellow at the Centre for Strategic Studies in Wellington, New Zealand. Van’s first book was Rival Reputations: Coercion and Credibility in US-North Korea Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2016). His latest book is On the Brink: Trump, Kim and the Threat of Nuclear War (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Van has testified before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, and is a frequent commentator in popular media and policy outlets. He was previously a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow (2014-15). From 2009 to 2014, Van held positions in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) as a strategist and policy adviser focused on the Asia-Pacific, senior country director for Korea, and working group chair of the U.S.–Republic of Korea Extended Deterrence Policy Committee. He is the recipient of multiple awards in OSD, including the Exceptional Civilian Service Medal.”

That Mr. Jackson is a well connected part of America’s National Security State apparatus and its technocracy of ‘experts in waiting’ should not surprise. Neither is his being a member of The Wilson Center headed by Neo-Con in all but name Jane Harmon!

Mr. Jackson’s maladroit attack on The Left begins in earnest with this revelatory paragraph:

No Theory of Security
There’s a second problem with progressive foreign policy preferences to the extent we can draw them out: None of it amounts to a statement about the hard choices involved in national security affairs. Put another way, the most identifiable tropes of leftist foreign policy tell us little about the kinds of foreign policy decisions the United States needs to make in order to secure itself in a tumultuous world.

What follows is a list of the ‘imperatives’ that these Leftist must make a part of their Foreign Policy imperatives , from a member in good standing of an utterly failed Foreign Policy technocracy:

On nuclear disarmament, On international order,On authoritarianism and democracy

The final three paragraphs lapse into what the policy technocrat- its pioneer Herman Kahn would have dismissed as an irrelevant a resort to modified use of a moral argument, instead of a realism based in an amoral frame . Jejune moralizing equaling the Court of Last Resort. Mr. Jackson doses enliven and garnish his muted hectoring tone with a more readable style, yet the Party Line of the Policy Technocrat is always the same: We are indispensable!

The mythology of Wilson’s Progressivism is framed by The Palmer Raids, The Espionage Act of 1917 .The Sedition Act of 1918 and the segregation of the city of Washington D.C. Wilsonian Progressivism was awash in an exploitable political/racial hysteria. History, how inconvenient for both Ms. Harmon and her hireling Mr. Jackson!